In the old world, companies used to differentiate between “technical” and “business” roles.

Career tracks matched these roles. Business roles were filled with MBAs. Technical roles had computer science or other technical degrees.

But along the way, something changed and technical literacy became more important for all roles. In the 1990s, three of the biggest employers were Ford, Chrysler and GM. Today, Facebook, Google and Apple “have 10 times the market cap but employ only a tenth of the people,” noted Dom Barton, global managing director for McKinsey & Co.

As Marc Andreessen wrote in his famous 2011 WSJ Op-Ed, “Software Is Eating the World.” Major transportation (Uber), hospitality (AirBnB), and financial (Coinbase) companies are increasingly run on software and are delivering services online. To have successful careers and stay relevant in business, all of us operating in the business world will have to develop and maintain a strong technical literacy.

Not convinced? The Harbus, the Harvard Business School’s newspaper, published a piece on why coding is the new business literacy.

Seeking technical skills, but not sure where to start?

It’s never too late to start. It doesn’t take many years (or decades) of learning to obtain a powerful technical skill-set. We’ll walk through a few potential starting points.

How old are you — and what opportunities are available at this stage in your life?

Cities like New York and Chicago are adapting their middle school and high-school curriculums to better prepare students for a tech-enabled world. Colleges have also created more technical opportunities. Harvard College announced that computer science had overtaken economics as the most popular undergraduate course. Duke graduated ~30 computer science majors in 2010, and six years later, 300+ students graduated with a CS degree — a 10x increase.

But what about the rest of us who missed this window? For those of us who already graduated from college (or are not going to attend college) — there are three ways to jump back in.

Self-study via online programs or intro to coding books

Attend a coding bootcamp — a 3–6 month long intensive program

Apply to a well-known, accredited university for a masters degree or PhD (or as some friends have done: get a second bachelor’s degree)

This guide will focus on coding bootcamps vs. self-study, but we’ll briefly touch on applying to an accredited university.

An aside on graduate-level technical degrees

The major benefit of getting a graduate degree from a well-known university is: prestige. Even though Silicon Valley often claims to love college dropouts, brands like MIT and Stanford still hold a lot of weight for establishing technical credibility.

Many formal programs tend to be more academic than practical. Curriculums are slow to change and often don’t prepare students well for the skills in the job market today. Triplebyte, a YC company that matches programmers with companies, performed an analysis on college vs. bootcamp grads — and found that bootcamp grads “match or beat college grads on practical skills, and lose on deep knowledge.”

Nevertheless, to meet the job-market demand, universities are launching new programs — notably for the technical-business integration roles (e.g., Stanford’s joint CS MS/MBA Degree, Duke University’s joint between Economics and CS). Every quarter, there are countless new programs starting across the world. If you’re familiar with other new technical-business joint programs, leave a note in the comments.

From now on, we’ll focus on coding bootcamps vs. self-study.

How do you learn best?

If you have a lot of discipline, self-study is a good way to go. There are countless resources online to help you learn. Often people find the most success with self study if (a) they have a specific project that they want to build or (b) they follow a well-known curriculum.

Some of the most popular programs:

Harvard’s (online). You’ll learn from the legendary David Malan. Description: “Topics include abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. Languages include C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML. Problem sets inspired by real-world domains of biology, cryptography, finance, forensics, and gaming.” This course is more focused on computer science than on web-development. Time to complete: ~180 hours (9 problem sets taking 10-20 hours each and 1 final project). No schedule; learn at your own pace.

Flatiron School’s online programs on intro to Javascript or iOS Development (Swift). These programs are designed for complete beginners or programmers new to Swift/Ruby/Javascript. No schedule. Learn at your own pace. Time to complete: ~50-125 hours of rigorous coursework including project time.

If you’ve successfully self-taught yourself, please share your story and favorite resources in the comments!

What’s a coding bootcamp?

A coding bootcamp is a technical training program that focuses on teaching skills that the market needs. Bootcamps are generally 2–6 months, and are designed to place students into jobs when they graduate.

There are a wide range of coding bootcamps. This guide will focus on full-stack web developer bootcamps, which focus on both front-end (e.g., HTML/CSS/JQuery) and back-end skills (e.g., often in Javascript/Node.js, Ruby/Rails, or Python/Django).

For those looking to focus on mobile development, there are iOS and Android developer bootcamps. There’s also some excellent programs for data science bootcamps. In general, less technical bootcamps (e.g., product manager bootcamps and design bootcamps) don’t score as high ratings and don’t seem as impactful for job switchers compared to the technically-oriented ones.

Ok, if everything I need to know is online (and free!), why go to a bootcamp?

Learning how to code requires a maker-schedule: long periods of unstructured time to be creative and work through a problem. Graham observed: “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.” Coding is nearly impossible to learn in 1 or 2 hour long increments in the evening — it requires long 5+ hours stretches over many weeks.

Having experienced developers around helps a new student get through roadblocks faster. You can save hours of your life by working near someone who can skim your work and let you know that the problem in the code you’ve been working on for the past 5-hours is: a missing semicolon.

I tried many self-study courses and none of them stuck for me. Learning how to be a software developer requires a lot of effort to get over the “hump” in the beginning. As one person said — coding is like golf. Golf is absolutely terrible if you don’t know how to play, but as soon as you can play 18 holes, it’s fun. I needed in-person class time and structure to build my base — so I decided that coding bootcamp was the right move for me.

So, how do you pick a bootcamp?

Start with the city you’d like to live in

Most of the major US cities have a top-tier coding bootcamp. It’s useful to start building your network in the city you’d like to live in long-term. You’ll also make life-long friends in the bootcamp, and they will be indispensable to have around when you’re starting out.

Pick a bootcamp that fits your learning style

Some bootcamps are for people who are starting at zero, and others are for people who start at “20%.” Some are in-person and others are remote. Some are shorter/longer than others.

Hack Reactor/Maker Square — Dubbed as the “Harvard of bootcamps — the best place to get your CS degree for the 21st century.” It’s more expensive than the other ones. Generally if the others start when people have 0% skills, Hack Reactor requires 20%. You’ll have to study a decent amount to get into the program. When I was applying, I was working full time in private equity and didn’t have the capacity to do that kind of studying to get into the program. So, I didn’t apply.

Dev Bootcamp — I graduated from here, and I’m biased. Similar to Hack Reactor, it supposedly has a 5–10% accept rate, meaning that people who attend are serious about the program. Getting in requires some studying but less than Hack Reactor, perhaps ~15 hours of Ruby on Codecademy. The thing I like the most about this program is its emphasis on emotional intelligence. EQ, meditation, yoga and empathy are all a core part of the curriculum and culture. Compared to other programs, it’s longer. It has about 2 months of “remote” work (e.g., 20–25 hours per week) and then it goes into 3 months of intensive (e.g., ~6 days a week 12+ hours per day). The benefit of the 2 months of prep means that all students arrive on the first day of the intensive session with a similar background. In other bootcamps, students arrive with a more varied set of experiences and some are much more advanced than others.

The coding bootcamp landscape is constantly changing. None of these schools are accredited, and they are regularly updating their curriculums to match today’s job market.

Which language should I start with?

I wouldn’t get caught up in the language debate (e.g., Ruby/Rails vs. Javascript/Node vs others). Bootcamps teach you how to understand the basics of coding, and you can learn the rest. Although Dev Bootcamp is predominately a Ruby/Rails program, many of my classmates now work in Javascript or in other languages that they were able to learn because they understand the basics. As long as the program is based in Javascript/Ruby/Python for web developers or Swift/Java for mobile developers, you’ll be able to pick up additional languages after the program is over.

Is coding bootcamp really worth $10–15k?

Note: Just because a bootcamp costs $15k doesn’t mean it’s a quality bootcamp. There are many scams on the market. Ask around for recommendations before applying or attending a bootcamp. There’s only a small number of good bootcamps, and then the quality drops off quickly.

Many people ask me whether it makes sense to quit their job and drop $15k. It’s a tough decision that you’ll have to answer, but programs like Dev Bootcamp can soften the blow. The first 8 weeks of Dev Bootcamp are remote, and only require ~15–25 online hours per week. Many people in my cohort stayed employed during that time (I did, too). After that time, you are able to make the decision if you want to quit your job and do the full-time program. I decided to quit and go full-time, but there were others that decided not to do the intensive bootcamp. It’s a great learning experience even if you start with the remote program.

From a financial perspective, many of my friends are working in junior software developer roles and getting paid post-MBA level salaries. [What’s better $15k in a coding bootcamp for $125k+/year salary or $200k of debt for an MBA for $125k+/year?].

Can I really learn enough in 3–5 months to get a real software engineering job?

Yes. Let’s do a thought experiment. At Duke, a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Computer Science requires 9 computer science classes. To graduate from Duke, a student needs to take 34 classes. This means that only 1 in 4 classes for a CS major at Duke was a computer science class — and the rest were core curriculum and elective classes. If college is 4 years, this means that a CS graduate has effectively taken 1 year’s worth of computer science classes. An academic year is ~8 months. So, if we compare a computer science major (~8 months of CS classes) to a bootcamp grad (~5 months), a CS major has about 3 months more training (plus, maybe internships).

Additionally, a CS major requires many academic courses that aren’t as applicable to the working world. CS degrees are often from liberal arts colleges that do not have such a focus on employment. Bootcamps are designed to place graduates into jobs.

Of course, getting a CS degree is a massive accomplishment and you will learn things that bootcamps don’t cover. With both paths, you’ll need continue to learn more, but the goal of the thought experiment is this: you can learn a lot and get dangerous in 5 months in a bootcamp.

Friends of mine from Dev Bootcamp and Hack Reactor have gone on and gotten software engineering jobs at companies like Google Life Sciences, Coinbase, Instacart, and many other engineering-led companies. They competed against CS majors for all of those roles. More and more people are entering engineering careers via non-traditional paths.

Perhaps most importantly for me, Dev Bootcamp changed the way I see the world. Before I attended, I had many ideas that I wanted to build, but I had no idea how to do it. Now, my limitation is no longer skill, but time — and that’s empowering.

There are advocates and naysayers who develop increasingly strong opinions on whether coding bootcamps are effective. Advocates tout benefits such as accelerated learning of relevant technologies, low cost, accessibility, and flexibility. These benefits give inspiring Coders the ability to learn quickly and gain employment sooner, all while paying less than the cost of traditional learning. Naysayers, on the other hand, cite non-traditional learning methods and a lack of government oversight as areas of concern. While both sides of this debate can be correct, there is a strategy for succeeding in a coding program like Code Ninja's.

Create a dedicated workspace, and make it awesome!

A dedicated workspace does not require a huge amount of cash. As an inspiring Code Ninja you’ll learn from home most of the time. You must find a space that’s quiet, clean, and allows for ergonomic amenities. You can find high-quality furniture at IKEA, or buy used from a site like Craigslist. Consider using a standing desk, or treat yourself to an ergonomic keyboard. Better yet, you can buy a sitting desk and create a standing desk, so you can stand or sit.

After your setup is done, build the rest of the are around them. Hang pictures or inspirational wording and buy a small bookshelf to fill with books. Save your cash for the most expensive stuff, like a laptop and extra monitors. It’s essential that you have a good laptop, and I recommend splurging on a good monitor or two. You’ll need to have multiple windows open from time to time, and a large monitor provides the screen size to do this.

Finally, if you live with others, ask them to respect your space. A clean, organized, and comfortable space will set you on the right path for succeeding in our coding programs.

Immerse yourself

When you take an in-person program, immersion in the topic is a given. You’re physically near your fellow Code Ninjas which means that you’re likely to discuss the program and share information. As an online student, immersion is not necessarily a given – you have to make the effort. Your program will probably have a community – forums, chat rooms and email lists – and while those are good places to chat, you can not stop there. Subscribe to blogs and webinars and find people to follow on Twitter. Get to know the lingo, and some of its key features. Check out Stack Overflow and see what problems people face and how they are solving them. It doesn’t matter if you understand everything immediately, it’s important to become comfortable with a the “language” you’re learning. A few extra steps go a long way

Code Everyday

Immersion programs impose a routine of coding because you have to go to a single location at specific times. No matter what type of program you are taking, you have to create a routine. Without a consistent and disciplined routine of coding, you will not succeed in learning and growing. Whether you spend 30 minutes or 4 hours coding, you must code every single day. Develop a habit for yourself. How long it takes to form a habit depends on the individual, but you’ll know once you develop it because it will feel wrong not to code. Make sure that your coding time is scheduled when you are at your mental best, and not when you’re tired or easily distracted. Find a method that helps you get into a focused zone, and make sure you schedule your coding time around it.

Find Peer Groups

The fact that you have a classroom does not mean you should avoid other people. An online program offers less benefits over an in-person program, and interactions are something it can not offer. Fortunately, there are many options for meeting your peers.

For example, if you’re inspired to become a JavaScript web developer, there is almost certainly a JavaScript meet-up in your area. Or join use at one of our community events, where you can discuss your goals with others, tell them what you’re working on and what you’re having trouble with. You’ll learn a lot from these events, and often in ways that are hard to duplicate virtually

Celebrate Your Awesomeness!

No matter how great your cohort is or how many events you attend, as a Code Ninja you’ll spend most of your time in front of a computer. It’s easy to forget how much you’ve learned when nobody is there to show you. You must make it a habit to remind yourself. At the end of every day, you should celebrate your awesomeness! That is, think about what you learned, compared to the prior day. Think about the problem you’ve been having, and that you finally solved. Even though these may seem like small wins, celebrate them! Treat yourself to a beer, order a pizza, or do something to spoil yourself for every little awesome win.

Celebrating your wins is as important as confronting your fears. If you focus too much on either, you’ll derail your progress. Develop a balanced mindset for both, and you’ll create momentum, and a grit to push you through problems.

Is a coding program right for you?

It certainly can be, but whether it does or not depends on your commitment, consistency, and discipline. The strategy outlined in this article will help you succeed in your journey to becoming a developer, but you have to embrace every part. If you feel these points speak to who you are, we challenge you to apply to our Code Ninja programs where we will provide you with the skills needed for one of the highest paying and most demanded career fields, at a fraction of the cost and time required at a traditional school.

Whether because of university, or just to save a bit of money on the ever-increasing price of rent, living in a shared house is something that is becoming more and more popular.

Living with other people can be a really great experience, and you have the opportunity to learn a lot from each other and make some great new friends.

It will also come with its challenges, and there will be areas of contention. Sharing living spaces is tricky, and everybody has different boundaries and preferences.

The golden rule for living with others is to treat everyone as you would like them to treat you. Mutual respect is the foundation of a happy household!

Here are some tips for creating a peaceful and relaxed shared home.

Keep in touch with each other

Whether you end up becoming close friends or not, it’s important to make sure everyone is kept in the loop about what’s going on within the household. Don’t have someone staying over or host a mad party without asking first!

A group chat on something like Whatsapp is the ideal way to ask if someone can pick up milk on their way home, let each other know about bills, or even just share the latest hilarious memes with your new best friends.

It’s important to keep track of who owes what, so consider sharing a Google spreadsheet, or use an app like Splitwise. It does all of the hard work for you and has a lot of useful features like recurring costs, and being able to choose exactly how to split every bill.

Homeslice is another great app you can use to track not just bills, but also chores and shopping lists. There’s no way to send money from within the app so you will have to do this separately, but this is a great app if you think you’re going to be too shy to ask someone to do the washing up or take out the bins in person! Get it on iOS or Android.

Food

Decide whether you’re all going to cook for yourselves, or cook for each other on a rota system. It can be nice to occasionally get together for a meal, especially when you’re still getting to know each other. You might also want to prepare all of your own meals so you have full control over your weekly spending.

Whatever system you agree on, decide which groceries are going to be communal, and make sure everyone either chips into a kitty or takes it in turns to buy things like milk when they run out.

Don’t steal your flatmates’ food, and if you really have to borrow something make sure you let them know. Nobody wants it to come to passive-aggressive notes.

Cleaning

Make sure that nobody feels like they’re always doing all of the cleaning by either drawing up a rota or assigning everyone an area that they are responsible for keeping clean and tidy. Use a whiteboard to keep track of cleaning and to hold everybody accountable.

If you live with a few people, it may even be worth chipping in to hire a cleaner. It’s more affordable than it would be if you lived alone, and it can eliminate a load of stress!

Respect each other’s schedules

One of the biggest reasons for conflict when sharing a living space can be clashing schedules.

We spoke to LondonFoxLettings.co.uk, a flatshare operator who offer rooms to rent in London, for their advice. They told us: “It’s really important to respect your flatmates’ schedules. You don’t want to have a go at someone for having a party when you’ve got to be up early if you don’t have a leg to stand on because you did it to them the week before”.

Another thing to consider is who needs to use the bathroom first in the mornings. Keep in touch with each other and try to agree who’s gonna go first in advance, especially if you only share one bathroom and all have to be up at a similar time! Getting into a routine with these sorts of things will help keep things harmonious.

Don’t be passive aggressive

Just don’t. If somebody has done something to bug you, tell them calmly and politely, and hopefully they will stop. If you leave an angry note, or just start being off with them, they are less likely to care about whether or not they are bothering you.

Sometimes you also need to learn when to pick your battles. Weigh up whether the issue is important enough to potentially cause bad feeling between you and the offending party.

There are always different approaches you can take, and in some cases it might even be best to just let it go!

Now more than ever before, people are health conscious and desire to get their bodies into shape. In order to fill the demand of this fitness boom, countless fitness and diet programs have emerged claiming to help trim fat just in time for bikini season. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these programs either do not target calories in an effective way, or are too repetitive and thus work only certain muscle groups and ultimately bore participants. Where many fitness programs have failed, boot camps succeed. Not only are they effective and fun but also boot camps help clients reach their goals without wasting time or money.

Boot camps balance value with the effectiveness and attention of personal trainers. A session of personal training could easily cost 4 to 5 times more than the cost of a boot camp, yet both fitness programs offer top-notch personal attention. In addition to the guidance of a trainer, boot camp also boasts a motivating environment due to the group setting in which participants push each other to work harder than ever before. As a result, participants can burn more fat, boost their metabolisms and get in better physical shape.

Boot camp trainers know healthy living requires more than daily exercise. That is why the best boot camp programs also provide innovative and realistic nutritional coaching to help clients learn how to eat cleaner and supplement their workouts for more effective results. The personal attention that boot camps offer coupled with realistic nutritional planning helps clients of boot camps achieve their fitness goals.

Boot camp workouts involve all sorts of circuit, cardiovascular, endurance, and resistance training to work every part of the body and keep the workouts fresh, yet challenging. The group setting provides increased motivation by inspiring participants to feel they are part of a “pack” of like-minded individuals all looking to improve themselves one burpee at a time. Participants also feed off of each other’s energy and excitement, which makes each workout more productive because participants learn, adapt, and achieve together.

The effectiveness of boot camp workouts is largely due to the fact that they are based upon exercise science and physiology, using the proven techniques of resistance and cardiovascular training, as well as specific weight training exercises. Building muscle is essential to boosting the body’s metabolism to effectively and efficiently lose weight by burning more calories throughout the day.

With a fitness boot camp, not only are the workouts intense enough to provide you with the results you want, but you will find that the personal trainers and instructors help provide the necessary motivation to keep you consistent. In just 30-40 minutes boot camps work every muscle group, through the fusion of resistance-training, cardio core workouts and other exercises to help get clients lean and ready to take on the world. Fitness boot camp is the most cost-effective way for clients to get the body and lifestyle they need to feel confident, energized, and all-around happy.

In this new digital area, some Gen-Xs with résumés that used to be considered impressive (i.e., long) face an uncertain career future. But a number of these Generation Xers have found a solution to simply make a change to an unsatisfying careers: They're enrolling in coding bootcamps to learn how to code and start a new career path.

Programs like 12-Week accelerated learning program, show that 18% of students across all of the U.S. and abroad are 35 or older. The programs biggest groups, not surprisingly, remain people in their mid-20s—just like much of the industry the over-35 hope to join.

Despite the age difference, these freshly inspired coders have high hopes for their new careers, and can sound as passionate about coding as any hoodie-wearing college dropout. Some are transitioning from un-related industries in order to learn how to code, while others are embracing the change in the industry, which helped put them out of a job.

"I feel like I had been searching tirelessly and found this new thing I never expected—code," said Jessica Willard, 37, who had a marketing agency in Las Vegas for decades. "It introduced me to a new way of interacting with individuals."

Mrs. Willard, who was also director at MGM for ten years, followed her career pivot point to a article she read in 2014 where a female engineer insisted that women were naturals at coding.

She started RAMP program, closed her agency and began developing her ninja skills as a freelance full-stack developer—working on both a website's back end and its user-facing side. Now she's ready for a career in coding. "I really want to work for an organization, who looks at my portfolio, not just my resume," she said. "Someone who says, 'You have done some really cool [experience], and we want you on our team!' "

Monster.com has well over 10,000+ JavaScript developer positions available, that opportunity might be easy to find. Susan Jenkins was a real-estate agent for most of a decade starting in early 2000s, a period that saw dramatic change in the market. Coming back to work after three years as a stay-at-home mom, she decided to reinvent herself as a software developer.

In February, Ms. Jenkins, 43, began job hunting—an experience she likens to going on a blind date and didn’t know how much to talk about their past.

By March, Susan had landed a position as a designer at an interactive website design startup. Most of the team are in their 20s.

"We can talk about some of the old school stuff, like growing up with not having a cell phone and dial up internet," Ms. Jenkins said. "The 20-somethings are in aha of what I had to endure and we have a few laughs."

Getting the opportunity

Hiring Managers and recruiters cite a number of challenges for middle-aged bootcamp graduates. Hiring managers prefer candidates with actual degrees, as well as coding experience—though not too much. "The view is that they'll be harder to adapt to new technologies," said Mark Stevens, founder at FUNL.io.

One solution is to look for jobs at early-stage startups, rather than established companies. "The best bet is to find a startup that is looking to add a few developers, and has at least one senior developer to help mentor others.” said David Rice, managing partner of PapcerClip Ventures, in San Francisco.

It also helps if there's an internship or training program—which know the value of coding bootcamps, . "We evaluate individuals over a three-month internship, and we look for aptitude. If the aptitude is there, then we know we can help them become awesome developers for our team."

We understands that, its older students do great. "Ninjas that take the leap to switching careers, tend to be passionate and self-confident.

Other challenges

But a youth-oriented industry and the lack of a formal degree aren't the only challenges for GenX bootcamp graduates. While coding academies boast of job-placement success rates of well over 90%, with average starting salaries of more than $70,000, some career changers must brace for a salary reduction.

James Strong, 48, expects any job he finds as a developer to pay less than he made working for one of the largest computer companies in the world, as a Service Director, before he was laid off.

"Whenever I mention I couldn’t find a job, many couldn’t understand how being over qualified is a huge hurtle to get over." Mr. Strong said. He added that he was happy in his old profession, but had found that the most rewarding moments in his career were spent on "smaller projects, working with the development teams," doing software work.

His family gave their blessing for his new career—despite the expected pay cut, the $15,500 in tuition and the minimum three to four months off that he'd need for the program. "I want to wake up in the morning excited to do something new and build some really cool stuff," Mr. Strong said.

He isn't alone among midlife career changers wanting to fulfill a long-held ambition. Accelerated learning bootcamps may not replace a CS degree, but the 12-week programs, which include hundreds of hours of prep work, are intensive enough for a career do-over.